2012 book 68

Seanan McGuire's Discount Armageddon
McGuire--author of the Rosemary and Rue series and the Feed series (under the name Mira Grant), both of which I've enjoyed (though the zombie one gave me nightmares)--apparently decided that writing two series wasn't enough, and threw a third into the mix. This one is an urban fantasy about a young woman from a family of monster-hunters-cum-supernatural-beastie-peacekeepers who is unfortunately also a ballroom dance enthusiast (waaaaaay too much of the first half of the book is spent mentioning her dancing. It's "I like this kind of fighting b/c it's like dance!" "Dancing makes my legs strong!" "Dancers are flexible!" I swear the word "dance" and its derivatives appear like 5000 times in this book. Plus she keeps talking about wanting to make Dancing Regionals, and the talk about Regionals just made me think about that episode of Community about the Glee Club and I couldn't help smirking).

ANYWAY. The romance aspect feels kind of phoned-in at first but eventually gets more organic, I liked what McGuire did with the various supernatural creatures (especially the dragon princess concept), and I hope to see more of the protagonist's family in later volumes, b/c there is a lot of promising stuff there.  This would have gotten an A/A- except the dance stuff was so egregiously annoying that it's been downgraded to a B. OK, a B/B+. The second half really was pretty strong.